Bayview Free Parking Zone: sidewalk

From SFGate,

Residents who live on the 1400 block of Palou Avenue say parking scofflaws avoid the angst of on-street parking by simply pulling their cars, trucks and SUVs onto the sidewalk - for days and often weeks at a time.

Read more at SFGate

Last Fall, high-up DPT folks James Lee, Deputy Director of Enforcement at DPT, came to the monthly police captain's meeting and were alerted to this issue and all the side issues that went along with it.  We were told that many of the meter maids were local to the Bayview and so many knew the very scofflaws they were supposed to be ticketing.  We were assured that things would change, and that officers' assignments would no longer be in the part of the city in which they lived.  At the next meeting, we were told that these changes had been made, but that attempts to cite illegally parked cars en masse had resulted in a great deal of anger from residents, and police had to be summoned to restore order (as mentioned in the article).  Well, apparently that scared DPT back into 'do nothing' mode, and as a result, nothing has changed. 

Oftentimes, the problem isn't that there isn't parking close by to people's houses.  One problem is that people can't seem to walk half a block to their car - and who can blame them if they can get away with parking in front of their own house, albeit technically illegally, on the sidewalk.  Another problem is that many households have three, four, five cars or more, and on-street parking just isn't designed to handle that kind of capacity.  Couple that with garages that have been remodeled into living spaces, which has the double impact of eliminating an off-street parking space while increasing population density, and we can see why this has gotten out of hand.

Some ideas:

- attempt to reduce the number of vehicles registered to a given address.  Create an annual per vehicle surcharge for people who have more than two vehicles registered to an address.  Allow residents who only have one or no cars registered to their address to get a tax rebate, say at half the rate of the surcharge

- mount parking ticket cameras on street cleaners just as has been done on MUNI buses.  This will relieve DPT officers from the job of ticketing cars parked on-street during street cleaning and will allow them time and resources to instead find and cite cars parked on sidewalks.  As was reported back in May, this is actually being tested here in SF, and results are expected to be studied this Fall.

- the city could issue street sweeping parking permits that people could hang from their rearview mirror while the car is parked on the sidewalk during street sweeping times.  It would only be valid on that day and time, would be tied to your address and only usable if there was still 4’ of available sidewalk for people to use during the time that your car was there.  If your car was found to be on the sidewalk outside the two hours of street sweeping time, even with the permit tag, you’d get a ticket and/or revocation of your permit.  

Got an idea how to fix this problem?  Let me know in the comments.